The Arkeo team has been working to deliver the launch of the mainnet for quite a while (much longer than the team or anyone involved had originally hoped).
We have made substantial progress towards that goal, especially in recent months, and while the team has provided some updates via X and more frequently recent developer updates in the Arkeo discord - the team thinks that a longer form update here on the forum would be beneficial as we get closer to delivering the first instance of Arkeo Mainnet.
Some notes about the teams progress, challenges, remaining blockers, and what is left to be done to get us to mainnnet:
- The team experienced some disruption earlier this year when we lost much of our lead engineers’ time to personal reasons. This was a setback for the team, but we have since brought on multiple additional development resources to re-gain momentum on this front that have been making steady progress since those resources have been on-boarded.
- Airdrop snapshot work proved to be far more complex than originally planned. Turns out that doing a rolling snapshot across many disparate chains is actually quite difficult to get right! The team has been doing everything possible to deliver the airdrop that was voted on by the community, this included a lot of new code to handle the snapshot work across all the relevant chains. At this point everything is mostly ready to go, except for Osmosis which has proved quite difficult to get the snapshot to run correctly as well as identifying resources for an osmosis archive node. We are getting help directly from some Osmosis core contributors now and hope to have this finished in the coming weeks. We did just get great news in our team meeting this morning that we have finally managed to get a proper state export from an archive node for Osmosis from their team which we are now working with and should hopefully allow us to finish the osmosis snapshot work hopefully within the next week. This has been one of the biggest hurdles over the last 4-6 weeks so getting over this point is a big milestone.
- We had a few security issues to cleanup left-over from the security audit of the codebase that was done, the new engineering resources were able to complete this cleanup and fix all remaining issues in the code so that audit issues are no longer a launch blocker.
- We brought on an additional resource to help with cleaning up and updating the infra repo to make sure it would be a more streamlined process for new data providers to come online and serve the nodes they want to support. This work is mostly complete and is aimed to be ready for mainnet launch so that those who want to spin up data providers on the network have a good path via the infra repo to do that relatively easily. There will be some testing on this over the next few weeks to make sure the infra repo is in the right place for launch for data providers
- We have continued to run and iterate additional testnets during this time with strong support from validators and data providers, this helped us identify and cleanup some issues around the staking rewards which we are now validating with the latest testnet. The most recent iteration of the testnet has been running for about a week and is onboarding additional validators again as of today, we are testing everything with rewarding validator rewards from the reserve is working correctly as well as airdrop claiming code.
- External teams have been engaged (liquify and viewblock respectively) to spin up resources for a community dashboard and block explorer that should be available at mainnet launch or shortly thereafter. Team is coordinating with them on next steps.
- We continue to get high engagement from validators and potential data providers who are interested in helping with the current testnet and running data providers on mainnet.
Once we have finalized the remaining items around the osmosis snapshot and validated everything on testnet, the team should be ready to plan a launch date to deploy mainnet and the airdrop. I wish we would be ready to plan and project this date at the time of this post, but the team is focused on making sure that any date that is set at this point there is a high degree of confidence so we don’t end up back in a situation of having to push or miss additional launch dates.
Ultimately the proof of all this work will be in the pudding when mainnet can actually go live, the team looks forward to projecting that date in the coming weeks as all of the above blockers are finished and we become focused on final launch prep and planning. (edited)
If you want to keep up to date with the team’s progress - the best place for direct updates is in the team’s discord, please join if interested and we will provide an additional update hopefully soon when the mainnet launch timeline is re-set.